Training and Safety Tip: Master the chair
After your training flight, the postflight debrief, and your drive home from the airport, I want you to sit down alone for a few minutes in a nice, quiet place.
But not in some comfy easy chair. I’m thinking more like in a traditional straight-backed dining room chair. Or, even better, a folding chair. I don’t want you too comfortable, because you’re not done with your lesson yet.
Chair flying is an old-school method of visualizing portions of a flight in your mind, and acting out the control inputs with your hands and feet. Especially effective when learning new maneuvers, it’s a simple and reliable way of strengthening the neural pathways and building the muscle memory required for their mastery. In other words, it’s an excellent way to exercise the cognitive and kinesthetic elements of flight.
Plus, it’s—you know—free. And there’s not much else in aviation that is.
Now, it requires your imagination to mentally put yourself in the airplane. You’ll want to fully visualize what you did as you replay the lesson. So, you’ll need peace and quiet. And you’ll be pantomiming inputs to controls that aren’t there to build that muscle memory. Turning an air yoke. Sliding an air throttle. Moving air pedals with your feet. And, if appropriate, you’ll make traffic pattern calls or ATC radio calls out loud. If someone else is around, you’ll probably feel self-conscious. But know that the best pilots chair fly. Airshow performers both chair fly and “walk” their maneuvers—visualizing every step in the routine.
For aviators, a simple chair can be an effective flight simulator—not to belittle proper simulators, or even home desktop flight simulators, which are excellent skill-builders. But with the chair and the mind, you fly an exact replica of your actual training aircraft.
Of course, for chair flying to be effective, you need to do it right. So don’t chair fly a botched maneuver. Make sure the maneuver is one that you’ve completed correctly, as your goal is to strengthen what you did so that when you are back up in the air next time, you’ll be primed to repeat the success.
And, with the aid of a cockpit poster, you can also chair fly flight deck workflows. The sky’s the…uh…I meant to say...the kitchen or dining room chair is the limit!
